Message Therapy – A part of your sport preparedness

The practice of using touch as a healing method derives from customs and techniques rooted in ancient history. Civilizations in the East and West found that natural healing and massage could heal injuries, relieve pain, and prevent and cure illnesses.

Dating back to approximately 3000 BC in India, massage was used to treat an individual’s condition to restore their natural mental and physical balance by reestablishing harmony between themselves and the world around them.

Message therapy was also common practice in Egypt, China, Japan, Greece and Rome dating back from 2000 to 800 BC.

Massage became widely used in Europe during the Renaissance. In the 1850s, two American physicians who had studied in Sweden introduced massage therapy in the United States, where it became popular and was promoted for a variety of health purposes. With scientific and technological advances in medical treatment during the 1930s and 1940s, massage fell out of favor in the United States. Interest in massage revived in the 1970s, especially among athletes.

Today, massage therapists who specialize in sports medicine often utilizes massage techniques from these periods to aid an athlete’s recovery from intense exercise or as a treatment option when performing clinical rehabilitation. Of course, there have been many improvements since those ancient times.

Massage therapy is also a means to help prepare an athlete for competition, as a tool to enhance athletic performance, as a treatment approach to help the athlete recover after exercise or competition, and as a manual therapy intervention for sports-related musculoskeletal injuries.

Massage therapy targets tissues that may include muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia, skin, joints, or other connective tissue, as well as lymphatic vessels, or organs of the gastrointestinal system. Massage can be applied with the hands, fingers, elbows, knees, forearm, and feet.